The Romantic Appeal of a Basic Income Guarantee

I've often suspected that one of the appeals of a Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) is the idea that in the ideal society, people would only do what they feel like doing and that people shouldn't feel compelled to do something they didn't feel like doing (a teenage boy utopia). Some think this ideal is about to be realized because work is going the way of the dinosaurs, thanks to robots. Leaving aside the issue of whether work is actually facing extinction (which it isn't - see, e.g., http://www.economist....­), think about what work is: an exchange relationship, in which both sides feel what they get is worth more than what they give. There are lots of things people wouldn't do unless they got something in return (e.g., praise, respect, sex, the joy of complying with a cultural norm) and there is the myth of self-originating autonomous action, unfolding out of pure ebullience: a traditionalist view of things, steeped in the Old Europe of Rousseau and his fellow Romantics.